A tour of Tempo: a program specializer for the C language

Specialization is an automatic approach to customizing a program with respect to configuration values. In this paper, we present a survey of Tempo, a specializer for the C language. Tempo offers specialization at both compile time and run time, and both program and data specialization. To control the specialization process, Tempo provides the program developer with a declarative language to describe specialization opportunities for a given program. The functionalities and features of Tempo have been driven by the needs of practical applications. Tempo has been successfully applied to a variety of realistic programs in areas such as operating systems and networking. We give an overview of the design of Tempo and of its use in specializing realistic applications